TY - JOUR
T1 - Lexical restructuring in the absence of literacy
AU - Ventura, Paulo
AU - Kolinsky, Régine
AU - Fernandes, Sandra
AU - Querido, Luís
AU - Morais, José
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Dr. Manuel Rodrigues, Lisbon Council Coordinator (Illiterates’ Training Program), for all his support and enthusiasm, and four anonymous Reviewers for their very helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Preparation of this article was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and European Community FEDER funding (project POCI/PSI/56901/2004, “Visual phonology and auditory orthography”), by the Centro de Psicologia Clínica e Experimental – Desenvolvimento, Cognição e Personalidade of the Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, and by a Belgian F.R.F.C. Grant (2.4580.02). The second author is Senior Research Associate of the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.N.R.S.).
PY - 2007/11
Y1 - 2007/11
N2 - Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In J. L. Metsala & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 89-120). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.]). Although literacy was not explicitly mentioned in this lexical restructuring hypothesis, the process of learning to read and spell might also have a significant impact on the specification of lexical representations (e.g., [Carroll, J. M., & Snowling, M. J. (2001). The effects of global similarity between stimuli on children's judgments of rime and alliteration. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 327-342.]; [Goswami, U. (2000). Phonological representations, reading development and dyslexia: Towards a cross-linguistic theoretical framework. Dyslexia, 6, 133-151.]). This is what we checked in the present study. We manipulated word frequency and neighborhood density in a gating task (Experiment 1) and a word-identification-in-noise task (Experiment 2) presented to Portuguese literate and illiterate adults. Ex-illiterates were also tested in Experiment 2 in order to disentangle the effects of vocabulary size and literacy. There was an interaction between word frequency and neighborhood density, which was similar in the three groups. These did not differ even for the words that are supposed to undergo lexical restructuring the latest (low frequency words from sparse neighborhoods). Thus, segmental lexical representations seem to develop independently of literacy. While segmental restructuring is not affected by literacy, it constrains the development of phoneme awareness as shown by the fact that, in Experiment 3, neighborhood density modulated the phoneme deletion performance of both illiterates and ex-illiterates.
AB - Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In J. L. Metsala & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 89-120). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.]). Although literacy was not explicitly mentioned in this lexical restructuring hypothesis, the process of learning to read and spell might also have a significant impact on the specification of lexical representations (e.g., [Carroll, J. M., & Snowling, M. J. (2001). The effects of global similarity between stimuli on children's judgments of rime and alliteration. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 327-342.]; [Goswami, U. (2000). Phonological representations, reading development and dyslexia: Towards a cross-linguistic theoretical framework. Dyslexia, 6, 133-151.]). This is what we checked in the present study. We manipulated word frequency and neighborhood density in a gating task (Experiment 1) and a word-identification-in-noise task (Experiment 2) presented to Portuguese literate and illiterate adults. Ex-illiterates were also tested in Experiment 2 in order to disentangle the effects of vocabulary size and literacy. There was an interaction between word frequency and neighborhood density, which was similar in the three groups. These did not differ even for the words that are supposed to undergo lexical restructuring the latest (low frequency words from sparse neighborhoods). Thus, segmental lexical representations seem to develop independently of literacy. While segmental restructuring is not affected by literacy, it constrains the development of phoneme awareness as shown by the fact that, in Experiment 3, neighborhood density modulated the phoneme deletion performance of both illiterates and ex-illiterates.
KW - Lexical restructuring
KW - Orthography
KW - Phoneme awareness
KW - Phonology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=34548431023&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.10.002
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.10.002
M3 - Article
C2 - 17113063
AN - SCOPUS:34548431023
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 105
SP - 334
EP - 361
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 2
ER -